Why Form a Band When You Could Be Watching Pebble Mill at One? (the answer’s in the question)

During the mid to late 80′s there wasn’t much for the kids to do. You could, like me, spend most of your leisure hours attempting to stick an RAF sticker on the wing of an Airfix Spitfire without creasing the little fucker. Or maybe you would spend the time more productively – perhaps programming BigTrak to lurch across the living room floor and clatter noisily into the nested tables (when it should have been headed for the kitchen to shoot your sister with a blue LED).

Musically it just wasn’t, rose-tinted glasses aside – a vintage time. Sure, we all look back at A-Ha with fondness and frug unironically to Bananararanarama at wedding receptions but none of it is suffused with, say, the timeless genius of the Beatles, the ire of the Pistols or even the thrilling ethnicity of James Brown (he’s black! And he’s proud!)

You could do things like join the International Queen Fan Club – giving you something to look forward to every 3 months or so when you’d get a 8 page booklet documenting the band’s activities (mainly a thinly disguised shill for Roger Taylor’s lamentable side project ‘The Cross’) but that was for only the truly dedicated.

Otherwise you were stuck with taping your favourite bits off the Top 40 Countdown on Sunday afternoon. Ear eagerly pressed to the radio… finger poised agonizing over record and play, hoping you’d manage to tape Don’t Blame it on that Girl (Matt Bianco, 1986) without getting too much of Bruno Brookes waffling over the intro.

The problem was that music had kind of died a death by this point. The electrifying clarion call of the Beatles and the 60s had given way to the thuggish glamour of the 70s and the piss and vinegar of punk has washed away everything in its path. By the late 80s, things had noodled into something of a dead end though. Thin retreads of Disco lined up next to a succession of pretty makeweights like the abominably named Halo James or Johnny Hates Jazz to fill the hit parade with fluffy toss.

As a result, for boys at least, music just wasn’t where it was at. A reading of my first few record purchases bears eloquent testimony to this:

• Dancing in the Street, David Bowie and Mick Jagger (past- it rock stars, cover version, charity)
• Running in the Family, Level 42 (the whole fucking album – 50p from Wakefield market in 1987, now £9.73 on Amazon. Go figure.)
• The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Prefab Sprout (OK – this is still fucking genius)
• Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car, Billy Ocean (cream suit)

So it is extremely likely that, had things continued down this same, endless ditch of impeccably produced gash, I’d never really have got into music. But then… came 1989/90… and the indie/dance crossover!

Stop tittering at the back. If you’re into guitar bands you’re spoilt for choice these days (so long as you like them to wear shirts and have fucking Town Hair and begin their name with ‘The’ and be either named after some half-forgotten youth trend of the late 80s or a really short word with a ‘k’ in it somewhere) but in 1989 ‘guitars’ meant Guns ‘n’ Roses or Poison, and unless you could stomach tight jeans and persuade your mum to let you use her hair bleach that was a non-starter in terms of hanging around on street corners looking cool.

So, when “Madchester” “happened” it “spoke” to “the kids.” All you needed to join in was some baggy jeans – available from any market at a reasonable price, messy hair (genetically yours by right) and a pout. But! Where the real appeal lay was in the fact that it was all so simple. Even a band like Northside, a great big heaving bag of shit, could get a record deal on the basis that they looked like electricians, hailed from the UrbanNorth (if anyone wants to use that name for their fucking marketing company I want a cut of the profits) and could bellow a load of drugs cliche over some cack-handed ‘funk’ rhythm. The natural corollary of that process was that anyone who could sing drug cliches like a Northern electrician could form a band, and therefore stand a chance of getting a shag.

(Never underestimate that facility in the creation of bands. People are often prone to saying things like “we were a reaction against what was going on at the time” in their post-career memoirs. If they mean “what was happening at the time was we weren’t getting laid” then they’re telling the truth. If they genuinely mean that they were consciously reacting in a considered artistic way to what other bands were doing than they are either liars or the kind of people who wouldn’t get laid under any circumstances and therefore are not subject to this overly long parenthesis anyway.)

Happily, being Northern and ugly, that included me – and as my mum had a 3/4 size acoustic guitar in the house I was pretty much good to go. But first… how to play guitar..?